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Cultural Critique 57 (2004) 47-67


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The Normalistic Subject and Its Curves:

On the Symbolic Visualization of Orienteering Data

Jürgen Link

Translated By Mirko M. Hall

First, a current discursive event that deserves to be called more than simply "molecular": on September 2, 2000, the (Springer) Bildzeitung headlined its issue with a downward-moving grey, white, and red serpentine curve that illustrated the rate of the euro from its beginning at $1.18 to its then current position at $.90. On the curve, three small golden-blue euros, in each of which a crack is forming, roll into the valley of the curve—at the bottom a large euro pathetically explodes into six fragments (after waiting undamaged and predominantly golden at the beginning of its ride in the upper left). The background is pitch black and carries the text: "So many men who introduced it failed in work and life"—and in the large bold print typical for the Bildzeitung: "Curse over the Euro?" Finally, we see four face portraits alongside the curve with block texts like "Shot himself dead;" "4 years imprisonment;" "Corruption, resignation;" and "Agonizing death from cancer."

We are dealing with a discursive event to the extent that the Bildzeitung has for a long time resisted the general trend of the German and international print media of disseminating the "normalistic curve-landscape." In the following paper, I would like to follow this landscape with several thoughts. Only very recently did the Bildzeitung begin to publish selected economic data and popularity tests in the form of curves. For decades, other publications regularly disseminated the infographs of the agency Globus Kartendienst or those of other partly homespun productions. Since the 1990s at the latest, [End Page 47]


Click for larger view		 The front page of the famous German "political tabloid" Bild shows the plunge of the euro during the year 2000. It asks: "Curse of the Euro?" showing the photos of four leading politicians committed to the creation of the single European currency who were jailed for corruption, committed suicide, or died.

these presses published complex curve-landscapes in all of the economic pages at least, from which they spread out into other columns. Ernst Schulte-Holtey has shown that entirely new media like Focus and Die Woche originated in the nineties in Germany, and were consciously conceived—at least subdominantly—as "publications of curve-landscapes."1 If one inquires about the possible reasons for the reservation of the Bildzeitung, one could cite the traditional credo of many pop journalists more than reasons of cost. These journalists shun all statistics because of their mathematical connotations and because they believe that only large photos of individual people can make possible a heartfelt identification. Since its beginning in 1986, the surprising success of the American illustrated newspaper USA Today shows that this credo cannot certainly be absolute or even generally true: with this publication, we are dealing—very much like Focus and Die Woche—with a distinct publication of curve-landscapes with large infographics like the euro curve. These infographics appear [End Page 48] on the front page of almost every economics section and on many front pages of the general news. Hence, processes of subjective identification can also take place with curves that condense statistical knowledge, an idea that the editorial staff of the Bildzeitung was the last to grasp. Interestingly, this insight could have come through another field entirely, one apparently very far away from economics and politics: in any case, for some time now the Bildzeitung has also subscribed to the trend that originated in the United States of representing the horoscope in the form of a curve. Here, the curve (swinging simply between "+" and "-") shows one's relative degree of "happiness." Such a procedure naturally rests on the presupposition that the "normal" reader already lives "in a curve-form"—that is, the reader perceives its existential feeling like an economic rate between ups and downs.

The euro curve is a regression curve, that is, a negative growth...

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